Sunday, May 22, 2005

So, I'm the father of a graduate. ("Okay, Dad. This is the deal. You've got six years to get an honorary doctorate from somewhere. You can't get it from anywhere that I'm studying, and you can't get it when I actually graduate anything, as you have to be there.")

Mike's also taught me to use the text-message-to-google trick, which suddenly started making life easier, finding restaurants and films and meeting places. If you use text messages, it's an astonishingly useful thing to have at your fingertips when you're, for example, in a cab and quite lost. http://www.google.com/sms/howtouse.html is the link. (I tried it back when they rolled out the feature, it didn't work well, and I forgot about it. In the meantime, they got the bugs out. Now, after two days, it's become invaluable.)

Maddy, meanwhile, has learned to do a rimshot- Good evening and welcome to the Maddy Gaiman show! And now... the moment you've all been waiting for... (drumroll please)......MADDY GAIMAN!!!!! "Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. I want to thank everyone for coming tonight! But I must bid you goodnight. So, now, before it gets to, like, two in the morning let's hear sports from Neil Gaiman"- (Sorry about that. She got to type while I went off and sang a goodnight "The Teddy Bears' Picnic" to Holly, which is something I always keep expecting her to grow out of and am always oddly relieved she hasn't.) Anyway, Maddy has now mastered the rimshot. With chopsticks as drumsticks. She spent this evening's meal telling bad jokes ("Little Old Lady Who?" "I didn't know you could yodel!") and then giving herself a rimshot (ba-dum-tink) with the chopsticks, table and glassware. It was funnier than it sounds. Which meant that tonight's dinner at one point consisted of me trying to explain my theory to Mike and his friends that people could become Spamomancers and foretell the future by what kind of spam they'd received from Persecution H. Foisting or Flange X. Innuendo that morning, while Maddy did told jokes and rimshots and Holly and Mary were down at the other end of the table trying to have a sensible conversation...

What was the title of that comic you did on the mudrder mystries that was to do with angels? I'm asking because I read it once and since then i cant find it anywhere. Mainly because I don't remember the name.

"Murder Mysteries".

Since you often mention "libraries under siege" articles, I thought this one, about the Las Vegas libraries, might be of interest. http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2005/may/20/518789934.html What's particularly irritating is that it's not a story of a kid who came to a library on his own and checked out adult material. It's a kid who came to the library with his grandmother, showed his grandmother an adult anime video from the library's adult collection that was labeled as suitable for audiences 17 and up. Together, the boy and his grandmother checked the video out, and it wasn't until they got home, and the grandmother saw scenes of graphic violence and sexuality that she looked at the box and saw that it indicated that it was inappropriate for children. And still, somehow, the library is apparently at fault for, well, not just assuming that the woman was not doing her job as the boy's guardian. And then the newspaper runs this editorial, and the story got picked up by the local TV news, because "Library Porn" makes a better headline than "Local grandmother can't be bothered to pay attention to what her grandson is watching, even when she's with him."

Hey Neil, I'm really sorry to have to bother you about this but I kind of need the fan-made clip where you're reading this - 'I slept for about ten minutes, then woke up from a strange and haunting dream, in which darkness had come to the world, a strange blackness from Outside. I was riding in a train through a desolate landscape. No people anywhere. Buildings stood, and leafless trees, but the colours were wrong and the sky was dark grey.... yadda yadda... world, which darkened slowly and terrifyingly to complete blackness... ' in the background. I just spent around 2 hours searching it with no avail.. T_T Could only find the link to your post on the 19th of September 2002. Sorry, and if you could help me locate the link it will be very very helpful indeed.